I'm reading "Trust us, we're experts" by Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber,
specifically the chapter about the reaction to, and suppression
of news about, a British scientist that was, for a while, prohibited
from talking to journalists. So he tallked to a friend instead,
and that friend ended up tallking to journalists, like in some Russian
fairy tale.

On the peer-to-peer journalism mailing list that I've subscribed
to, people are going on about karma, different ways of collectively
filtering out noise.

I wonder how resistant peer-to-peer journalism could be against
deliberate manipulation by industry shills. People feel invulnerable
now because they're not yet very important, but it's actually pretty
easy to create astroturf (pretend-grassroots) movements on the net.
It must be an existing industry.

There's a difference between karma and reputation. You can fake
a group that dislikes whistleblowers and votes down their articles,
but you shouldn't be able to give them a bad reputation. More accurately,
I wonder if it is possible to construct a system where it isn't possible
to give someone a bad reputation. Where people who are told "he's a
crazy old fool with no standing among his peers" can just look the guy
up and see, nope, his standing among his peers is impeccable.

This is more structured - needs to be more structured - than karma.
If you don't know the guy, you shouldn't be able to assault his reputation.

Maybe we ourselves, as we interact with people, exchange "reputation points"
with them; because I like you, I give you the right to make statements
about my character, as a token that proves to the outside world that
we really are connected, and to show that I mean to behave ethically towards
you (otherwise you might make bad statements about me).

Of course, this still doesn't mean that a lobbyist can't convince vaguely
related people to make false statements.

In the long run, I guess companies that fund research could demand
reputation tokens from the researchers as part of the commercial
relationship, and then we're all back to zero -- but hey.

e-business. I hate that word. I hate its enuciation on
KQED, eeeee-bizness, with a beat between the e- and the -business,
stress on the e and the biz. E-, pause, what am I doing here
reading these stupid ads, bizness.

It's not a word! It looks good in print, but it's not
pronouncable! You can stop now. Go use "electronic commerce" instead.

What is the Maglite logo? A broken-off ass? I don't understand!

Wittgenstein references in pop music

1., 2. Since "intellectual stimulation"
was the only feature listed as present
in both the most wanted and the most unwanted song, Komar and Melamid
working with Dave Soldier
included references to Wittgenstein in the texts of both their
5 minute country ballad and the unpalatable 22 minute rap area
interrupted by advertising jingles.

3. Track 10 of the Shamen's "Boss
Drum", a casual name drop along the lines of "what Wittgenstein
called the unspeakable". (I have no idea what they mean with that,
but that holds true for most of the rest of the monologue.)

4. Momus'
"Eleven Executioners", in the list of things that death will not be like:
"...that strange proposition on silence, the Tractatus of Wittgenstein".
(The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ends with the much quoted
sentence "Worüber man nicht reden kann, darüber muß
man schweigen", if you can't talk about it, be silent about it.)

5. There's a Laurie Anderson song "If You Can't Talk About It,
Point To It" on United States I-IV dedicated to Wittgenstein.

When someone writes, "On the Internet, we found
more than X00,000 pages on the subject of Y", chances are
Y is more than one word, and the author has just told you that they
don't understand the query language of their search engine
and searched, e.g., for foo bar on altavista rather than
+foo +bar.

The other thing the author just dropped was the difference between containing
a word and having a subject.
Add ignorance about the structure of the web, and it's X00,000 sites,
not just pages.

(Invariably, these people do not investigate the perceived over-representation
of their topic; it's all part of the Internet being full of weirdos
that are interested in anything.)

Sheesh, Jeeves

What's it with Jeeves (www.ask.com)?
How did investors stupid enough to believe that
(a)
a natural language interface is a good way of interfacing
with a computer system in 1999
(b)
the character of an English butler is a good way of
animating a search engine
ever get enough money to run TV ads for their service?

OK, maybe I'm weird. But to me, Jeeves
represents everything that I'm trying to get away from.
I don't want to involve other people, I think keeping
servants is immoral, and an old white male in a frock
is not who I turn to when getting net-based advice.

It doesn't work for my real questions, either; and
who are they kidding with their "recently
asked questions", where all proper names are prefixed
with a class designator? ("The language Indonesian", not
"Indonesian"; "the foot problem gout", not "gout".)

Of course, that mismatched character is nothing compared to
the nausea the Lycos ads ("lycos, fetch!") induce.
Cars and Claudia Schiffer, is that all we want?
And I'll have my porn without the dog drool on it, thanks.

And while we're on the subject of bad TV ads, can I please
have the address of whoever made the "about.com" spot
so I can avoid them for all my advertising needs?
(Pan across human about.com guides standing in a desert.
Different voices speaking part of the advertising copy.)

If only the campaign had focused on one guide at a time,
it could have been as interesting and colorful as e.g. the
Visa campaign (introducing interesting places that you can't
play with Amex at). Instead their Sprockets version is as boring and
flavorless as the "Internet desert" they're trying to distinguish
themselves from.

Who exactly, do the people behind that ad text think,
writes all those webpages on the Internet, posts in newsgroups,
and populates the chat rooms? Are we all just characters out
of Tron until about.com graces us with their greyscale portraits
and places us in a hierarchical context we don't control?

I love and respect editing and magazines; I think people
who know about a subject have the right and the obligation to
educate and help others. But all in one place, all looking
the same, all under the auspices of one site's policy,
gently interjecting focused advertising into the stream?
Internet startups are a cold and lonely place.

We have email viruses, we have spam. How long until the
two combine? Wouldn't it be funny if there were an email
virus that, apart from propagating itself, also occasionally
injects a paragraph into a user's email advocating some
product or service? Is that even a crime?

Could the same be done with ftp and downloads to websites?

"You can't surf from a cellular phone." Do you think that's true?
What if you had a fold-out/roll-out screen? What if you could mh-hm to your
phone to direct it to follow a link it just mentioned? I wonder what one
could do to such an interface to make it surfable.

What is it that makes something surfable in the first place? Having
a landscape of circumstantial information from which to pick?
It's not that sound is too low-bandwidth, it can carry a lot
of information. We just don't seem to be using it that way.

Bullshit detector.
Plugin for Netscape/Internet Explorer/ ... ; accesses text
in windows / object model, runs it through
www.cynicalbastards.com/wankometer, and displays an
animation (personally, I think a rotating flaming cow would be nice)
that increases in intensity as the text increases in buzzword density.

Meta-browser
Tufte meets Gibson meets Xerox. Not "Send me email when this
page changes", more "greet me in the morning with a rendered virtual
environment (casually representing page interconnections, ownership,
size, traffic) in which things that changed recently are rendered in
slightly more garish colors."

Virtual living room

A TV site combining program listings and per-program chat
channels.

I prefer watching TV to
watching videos because I know that thousands or millions of others
are seeing the same thing at the same time. By watching a video,
I merely amuse myself; by watching television, I catch up on what is
amusing everybody else.

refrigerator poet, n.
1. An unoriginal person.
2. A very good salesman (cf. "selling refrigerators to the eskimos")
Fish-shaped tea bags.
Integrated email client/calendar. Drag emails onto days, be
reminded of them when the day comes up.
Remailing service: forward to Jan-1-2000@hostname.com,
have it bounced back to you at that date.

Netlessness

We need a word for that specific flavor of horror vacui
that sets in at 8pm on a Saturday when you notice that
your cable modem service provider's down again, you can't
surf, and all the 24 hour technical support hotline has
to say is that "we are currently in the process of
upgrading the system" (hey, what else is there to do on a
Saturday night) and the tape is full.

You can't surf. You could watch TV instead, but you can't
reach the site with the TV program, and you can't use the IMDB
to check where you've seen that guy before. You can't send email
to your friends. You can't check which bands are playing.
You could work some, but you can't test what you've done
because the server you're testing against is somewhere
... out there.

There's the Platonian concept of reality being a shadow
of ideas. Without the net, I feel like I'm being left alone with
nothing but the shadows.

Cars with speakers on the outside so that its passengers
can sufficiently terrorize suburbs without placing their
hearing in danger.

Bumpology

There is a whole discipline of computer-simulated body/body interactions
(beyond mere collision detection) that I haven't heard much about yet.
When one thing bumps into another thing, what kind of shape is their
touching surface? How hard or soft are they? Do they bend
or crack? If they're translucent, can you see where they touch?
We have all this sophisticated stuff about describing shapes, but
don't seem to do much about their interaction.

Desktop PC videophones always feel a bit like surveillance
cameras - you're watching someone else from above, and even
if that other person is communicating with you, they're still
looking at a spot on the screen, not at the camera. One would have to move
the camera behind the screen to fix that.

When I was younger, my family took me to a sea bath.
I remember waves, and wooden planks, and an
almost-abandoned arcade that featured a game where one
had to steer a small airplane model mounted on a piece
of wire through a turning landscape, careful not to run
into the bridge or the mountain, with extra points for
flying under the bridge rather than over it.
This was not before the age of videogames (another game
available then was the classic Qix), but before
real-time 3D rendering of other than the most primitive shapes;
this game might have well been entirely electro-mechanical.

While half of my brain tried to keep the little airplane from
crashing into the bridge, the other half tried to come to terms
with the fact that what I was trying to do was obviously mechanically
impossible. Like the magician waving a hula-hoop ring around
the levitating volunteer, I was passing the plane again and again
through this model. At some point, the wire or string or whatever
it was that held it up would have to become tied up, or reach its end.

Only much later, after seeing the concept in a different context,
I realized that the final steps in my model world's construction
had involved a one-way mirror; that the little plane never really
passed through that bridge, never really collided.

Maybe one could rig a one-way-mirror to reflect an already
reflected videoscreen in front of the camera, and film to
the back.

For the consumer market, I could imagine something roughly
the shape of a photograph on your desk; only, it would be
two-way, and it would move.

Memorabilia for the 21st century.

[Update: Andreas Kraft, a former colleague of mine who now
works for the GMD, remembers:

A few years ago the DeTe Berkom ordered a
video terminal from Art&Com, and they
build a small series. It consisted of a
one-way mirror that projects an inverted
monitor image. Behind the mirror is a camera
that transmits the face of the speaker. The
whole thing is fairly lightweight, and you can
mount it on a phone "arm" and move back and
forth. I don't know what became of it though.
I think they just considered it research.
Right now, they're going with completely ugly
ISDN-Telephones with an LCD screen and a
little camera _next to it_.

Translation is mine. Andreas later added that he thinks
it was called "Mediatel".]

Have some way of capturing a person's body mass distribution,
and work it into a "bodyphone" rather than just a "videophone".
At the beginning of a call, the body shape is downloaded into
the recipient (if not cached); then motions are sent as
updates. The receiver sees a small figure bouncing up and
down on their screen, in sync (well, almost) with the motions
of the sender.

I don't think it's an accident that smell is tied
to memory. I think our smell processing structure
is geared towards picking out one small element among a
multitude of possibles and then retaining it in its
complexity. (That is different of the more discrete
kind of processing that we do when understanding a scene
or a sentence.) Once one has "homed in" on a smell,
it doesn't have to be very strong to still be noticed.

A TV remote control with a small LCD screen built-in that
lets the selecting person preview the image they're sending
to the group screen. TV tuner is broadcasting the small
image (or all possible such images?) via radio.

Two-way drones

Let's say Fry's (a big electronics chain) makes their inventory
accessible over the net. The stuff on the shelves and the inventory
differ; how do you figure out what is actually there without relying on
sales assistance? Users logged in via the web get little
periscope-headed drones to wheel around the store. Once a drone gets
in the general area of the thing the buyer wants, it can be made to
"blink", attracting the intereste of one of the customers in the area.
The drone has a mike/speaker or terminal that can be used to talk back
to the person wishing to purchase something. The rest is social
interaction between two customers.

(That's probably not world's best use of drones, but I would like
to pry computer-mediated interaction from the stasis it right
now demands from its participants; terminals that can come up to
you and blink at you sound like a step in the right direction.)

Also, "blue screen" scene alanalysis software
that can turn the parts of the image that consistently don't move into
any GIF you pick. (If you have props, pick them up and wiggle
them briefly before transmission starts.)

TranscripTV

Stage 1

Service: Given the (approximate) name of a program and
location (initially, the New York area) and time of reception,
a writeable DVD with that
program can be sent to the customer (a mail-order version
of lending a videotape from a video store).
Portable DVD players can also be rented. The DVDs can be
rented or bought.

Resources: Legal agreements with the broadcasting stations,
digital storage for the actual media, receiving stations that record
it, briefly trained editors
to find and copy the media, shipping and accounting departments.

Audience: People that normally don't watch TV, but need
to follow up to references to themselves, their products, shows
they want to appear on or work with.

Stage 2

Service: Companies and individuals can set up recording accounts
with TranscripTV. Account holders describe the type of scene or
name of the program
they're looking for, and receive weekly update DVDs
with a week's worth of the requested scenes.
It is cheap to record every instance of your favorite show;
it is expensive to record every mentioning of Mayor Giuliani.

Resources: Programs are recorded with an additional text
track where transcribers note general references and particular items
of interest to current subscribers.

Audience: Media/PR departments; people who would normally
own a ReplayTV but have no home to put it in.

Stage 3

Service: Instantaneous reply over the Internet of
scenes described by text to subscribers; a greppable, browsable
database of recent broadcast television media.
Subscribers can refer to clips in a number of streaming video
formats, or edit their own segment and then order it for
delivery on DVD.

Audience: A mass audience that has become used to the
Web model of greppable, instantenous media availability
and wishes it would only apply to television, too.

Heavy executive whiteboards, milky glass held gingerly in
mahagony frames, for use in front of window office walls.

Phonograffiti

Given a hard
recognition problem, simplify the job. Specifically, I wonder
whether it would be possibly to automatically transcribe speech data
into anything written that a human could understand - some
sort of phonetic representation one reads to oneself to recreate the
sounds - and leave the grammar and word boundary recognition to the
human brain. (What would a spoken equivalent of Graffiti be called,
"Late-night Ambulance Speeding"? "People Passing By in Large American Cars
with their Sterio Turned Way Up"?)

Pop Thesuarus

A web and database application that attempts to catalogue human
experience in terms of the subjects, themes, and metaphors used in
pop songs, with an abnormally enlarged branch on nuances of lost love,
no doubt.

overinteracting - nodding and saying "hm-hm" in movie
theatres, in front of the TV; talking to other drivers
while in cars.

Saturn is advertising their three-door coupe with footage of
a child getting in and out of the car on an empty road in a
cornfield and in a driveway of the generic suburban idyll.
Had they used city roads, a viewer would notice that the door
is on the driver side, hence on the side where exiting passengers
have to avoid oncoming traffic - not safe for children.
(However, a third driver-side door is convenient for single
grocery-shopping yuppies like me; but why would you show me
pictures of children to make me buy a car?)

A wristwatch for obsessive people on a diet. Start it in the morning; in
accordance with a pre-set total daily calory intake, calories
are added to the displayed number an can be subtracted as they
are consumed.
A very expensive restaurant where, for each dish ordered, a monitor is
placed on the guest's table; cameras in the kitchen controlled by a
central director broadcast the preparation of each specific dish to the
customer, until finally the image is replaced by the dish. (Waiters
carry small cameras dagling from portable camera stands clipped to the
plate.)
An air-filled rubber toy body with valves between head, arms, legs, belly.
The valves can be opened by squeezing them slightly, allowing the air to
be oved from one part to an adjacent one. (A cross between gumby and
a balloon animal.) Watch the incredible transformation of muscleman into
brainiac!
A wristwatch-shaped device for deaf people that translates high-frequency
noises into low-frequency vibrations, so it becomes possible to hear
a doorbell, a ringing telephone, or someone shouting at you from a
direction you're not looking into. (How does
one tell---can one tell---a ring from a talking voice? Maybe regularity of a
signal can make up for volume.)

Okay, I give up. The Stranglers, "Aural Sculptures", "Laughing" (ca. 1984):
Who is this song about?
The bad text doesn't scan very well,
but it seems to allude to someone
specifc:

You could have wasted yourself in a plane in the air /
But lead poisoning from your daddy to me just didn't seem fair /
Committing the crime of taking your time
Chorus: You're laughing, we're carving /
Your name in a tree for the kids to see /
We hear ya, we fear your ecstasy /
You paid the penalty
[...]
You could have hung your hat on a pretender's lust for fame /
But you refused to lay it down /
It took your old man to live in shame /
For committing the crime of taking your time

Anyone?

[Update: Bernd Herrmann points to Marvin Gaye's biography
at http://www.sdf.se/~simon/marvin/biography.html; he also
mentions two other songs written about Marvin Gaye's tragic
death: "I Wish Marvin Gaye's Father Had Killed Me Instead"
by the Chrysantemums, and "See My Ships" by the Violent
Femmes. Good call.]

A MIME type for cooties.

Rather than having
all these multipart/alternative MIME types with HTML or
MicroThis or MacThat in them, just have people send

and the recipient promises to waste two minutes and about a megabyte
of space rendering the sender's text with needless precision,
while wondering whether the sender is genuinely obnoxious or
simply can't be bothered to configure their software or switch
to a vendor that does not default to obnoxious settings.

Buffet magic:

Audience member picks teabag, writes letter or word on teabag,
then brews tea. Teabag is removed; the mug is passed to the
magician. Magician can reproduce writing after drinking
tea.

Magician begins to make cheese sandwich, then turns away.
Audience member writes
letter on cheese layer with ketchup, then closes up sandwich.
Magician eats
covered sandwich, pretends to "taste" writing and can reproduce
it.

Magician pretends to play "three-card monte" with tea leaves
in teabags. (Bogus, because tea bags are (a) closed (b) labeled
on the end of a string.) Tea is brewed and actually tastes
like the different tea.

Time-release capsules for fabric softener.
Cameras with indentations for the user's nose.
Natural media drawing program: in addition to what is being
done now, remember layers of paint below the visible one,
and reveal them (mix them in) as pressure of the pen
increases.

Time travel at the twist of a dial.
Distribute short range broadcasting stations throughout the
region that broadcast details of their site's history.
Tourists walk around with radio receivers; as they go near
a place, they can tune in to it.
Different frequencies for different epochs.

A stand-alone turntable for microwaves that don't
have one built-in. (Perhaps something contracting / expanding
as it heats up, "metal memory"?)
The volume of a car honking in response to a remote locking
mechanism (if at all) should be proportional to the
distance between car and opener.

Why you can read this

A hypertext encyclopedia, starting with the
fact that there is someone reading it.

Hardware: There are images on a screen. How do monitors work?
How does a mouse work, how do keyboards work? How do
semiconductors work? From Von Neumann model to today's
architectures. What is electricity? How is information
stored and manipulated?

Protocols and languages: IP, TCP, HTTP, HTML, C, C++.
How protocols and languages are formed; the IETF, the
different people and companies involved;
the growth and change of the Internet.
New media formats: images and audio formats; how they
are registered, how formats and viewers work together.
Who owns the physical layer, and what
happens there? History of telecommunications monopolies.

Biology, linguistics:
How do humans keep themselves alive?
What does it mean to see something on a screen?
How did language evolve and what
does it mean to "read" something? How do people learn to read?
Why can we tell letters apart at all?
How did today's American English evolve?

Personal histories: Where do you come from, what's the history
of your family? Why did you move to where you are now;
where are others, where were you when X happened? Why did
we write this?

Maybe what drives people like me to surround themselves with
scraps of paper is not carelessness
but some small remainder of reflexes that evolved in
ancestor birds or small furry animals; we're not
messy, we nist.

Lately, I've been lucky and seen a lot of Christopher Hitchens on C/SPAN.
He looks out of place on these panels, with his British accent
and literary brilliance, just breathless enough to
make his ethics believable.

Trying to immerse myself in Hitchens, all I find in my local
bookstore is "The Missionary Position". So that's who
wrote that book. When I first heard about a critical
expose on Mother Theresa, I wanted to get it immediately; then I
couldn't find it and slumped back into thinking, "Maybe it's
a cheap shot by some antireligious kook." Well, that was wrong.

But the book still isn't as revealing, and Mother Theresa's Dark
Secrets aren't as dark, as I would have hoped. Hitchens merely
points out that Mother Theresa acts not out of humanism or mercy,
but out of religious conviction that
the suffering are supposed to be tended to; not helped,
not healed, more ... maintained. Her other mission is to fight abortion;
to this end, she hobnobs with the people responsible for the misery
of the poor whose assumed relief built her public image.

Searching for more, I find a few essay collections on Amazon.
I don't like ordering from them anymore. First, the place
must be gigantic by now, and big bookstores are too powerful
already. Secondly, they've started lying with words.
They're having authors fill out questionnaires, and pay percentages
to people who link to their ordering system with specific book titles.
Both good ideas, but the filled-out questionnaires are called
"interviews", and the link pages are called "Xyz bookstore in association
with amazon.com", suggesting a professionalism, competence, and
human involvement
that just isn't there. I don't believe in fully automated associations.
Oh, and thirdly, I don't believe in the one-click option to search
about "related books" on "squirrel abuse" from www.altavista.digital.com
just because I can search for it. If they have to
absolutely take up my screen real-estate, they should check in their
data base if they have anything about the subject.

So, I don't want to buy books at Amazon because, like the
authors whose books I'd like to buy, I want people to be careful
with their words. Guess I'll just have to subscribe to
The Nation then.
Oh, look! They have a "The Nation Bookstore" in association with...
Ahrgh.

[Update: A year later, the Amazon tie-in is gone, but they've
grown to advertise a "The Nation Software
Store" that has customized logos, but otherwise nothing at all to
do with the paper; it's run by Digital River systems.]

Angels of Prey.

Gratuity Included

My German parents just visited me in Orlando. People
who don't speak one's language well are easily mistaken
as stupid, easy marks, suckers; tourists, in particular,
are thought to have interests other than defending
themselves against being scammed.

Out of five restaurant meals we ate together, three of
them ended with items on the bill that neither of us ordered
or consumed. They were always roughly 1/10th of the
dinner value; they always seemed to "fit in" with the
rest. One more drink than we had ordered; a third
appetizer when only two of us ordered them; a dessert
that suddenly rose in price.

My parents, who almost always check their bill, reported
the same scam from Naples; once, again, a false bill
in a restaurant; and when checking out of the hotel,
they found an unlabelled, inexplicable amount from the
hotel restaurant on their bill.
There was never an error in their favor, and never an
excessively large amount.

In three out of five cases, the error was quietly corrected
upon discovery. In one case, the restaurant made an attempt
to "make good" for the error with free drinks. In one case,
the waiter tried to explain the error with his
inexperienced mis-use of the cash register; his story -
adding a previous amount twice - didn't make sense given
the amount billed.

We are wondering: How do they make money off this? If those
bills actually come from the real cash register, don't they
have to be voided and corrected for the waiter to pocket
the money? How many attempts do they make per night?
Do they try it with all their patrons, or just with
dead-certain rubes like my parents? And don't the restaurant
owners catch on?

Cupid teething.

A vacuum cleaner with audio feedback about the amount of dust
picked up. Outside of TV ads, you can't really see whether or
not you're done with an area of carpet or not. [Update '98: There
are models that translate audio into blinking LED light.]

She was undergoing sleep.

TOYNBEE IDEAS
IN KUBRICK'S 2001
RESURRECT DEAN
ON PLANET JUPITER

-- Stencilled sign on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC

For all I knew, "Toynbee" could have been an upside-down insect,
but it turns out that one Arnold Toynbee coined
the phrase "Industrial Revolution" and argued for responsible
social reforms in the late nineteenth century. His nephew,
another Arnold Toynbee, was a professor of modern Greek and
Byzantine history, dean of his university, attended both
Paris peace conferences, and wrote the "Study of History".

Font morphing: a set of fonts that each have the same critical
points marked (the curly tip of an f, the three endpoints of a T.)
Extremes of "times bold here, grotesque condensed here" are marked on
a page; the formatter interpolates, slowly changing from one extreme
to the other.

[Update: If the two fonts come from the same family within
Don Knuth's Metafont system, this is easy. In the general case,
the consensus seems to be that the result would be too ugly
to even try.]

Are there any pressure-sensitive pen games?

A container for contraceptive pills that starts beeping
(ringing, vibrating, flashing, what have you) if it hasn't been
opened in 26 hours (except for one week in four, for
some types of pill). Could be worn on a keychain.

A lock that looks like a normal lock from the outside and opens with
a key. But rather than being opened by one specific key, it just scans
in an image of the key and passes it on to a computer;
the computer then signals whether or not to open the door.

Applications: Locks that can be opened with one of the keys you
already have, without forcing you to drag new keys around;
locks can be opened with any number of different keys;
locks that not just open, but also identify the person going in.

Prediction for 1997: A psychiatrist will invent a form
of therapy or diagnosis based on soap opera characters and appear
in a talk show to present his or her new self-help book about it.
[April 2, 2003: US "TV Guide" cover shows cartoon character
"Spongebob Squarepants" next to title "THE TV CURE.
Anxious? Sad? Lonely?
Watch these shows, and feel better fast." We're getting there,
but it's sure taking longer than I thought.]
Oscar Wilde, abridged:
There is only one thing being talked about,
and that isn't being talked about.

A network of language teachers & classes that offer free
translations into their language.
To translate a paper from English into Russian,
you'd pass it to an English class in Russia. (It's more
fun and more challenging than schoolbooks.)

Streets are empty at night so that tired people have an easier time driving.

Java applications:

Central file type registry:
Vendors contribute pieces of code that evaluate to a string
describing the file type and an estimate of the probability
of the file having that type by accident.
Users input a file name and/or all or the first couple of hundred
bytes of the actual data.
The pieces of code run as untrusted Java applets (or the equivalent
in your favorite "secure" execution environment).

World-Wide Regression Test:
Users contribute pieces of Java that have caused one or more
IDEs, compilers, what have you, to fail.
The system runs all these either against the visiting user's browser,
or against various IDEs installed on the server, or just redistributes
them as an archive.

localhost: Internet on a diet.
He was passionately thorough.
To him, "Carpe Diem" would have certainly
involved the FBI.
Display lighting: Portable PCs should have a light sensor
and adjust the display brightness depending on the environmental
brightness.

People think that the tapes they listen to are full because
they contain music. Actually, music is a recording medium for life.
After you've listened to the
same tape over and over again while being with one person, or
doing one thing, or being in one place, the music has been
used up, and you need to listen to other music if you want to
do new things, with new people, in other places.

Some time in the future, big companies will subsidize long-distance
phone calls in exchange for being able to periodically interrupt
them with advertisements.
[April 27, 1999: British Telecom is doing something like that, apparently after a number
of others that I haven't heard about.]

Comfort Noise

Silence detection and -suppression is a common feature of digital telephony.
When a speaker falls silent, a few moments of "comfort noise" are recorded;
then the source stops transmitting audio and just sends "still silent"
indicators, while the other endpoint of the line replays the recorded
comfort noise over and over again.

Given that, there really should be special tariffs for people who like
to be silent on the phone.

Certainty.
Whenever software asked her whether she was sure she wanted a
document deleted, an operation executed, a session ended, she
felt the urge to reply "No." Yes, she wanted it done, but was
she sure? She was never sure of anything.

Melinda, First Lady of Magic

Saw her on a Jay Leno rerun from May (or was it March?) just now.
To the first bars of Nine Inch Nails, "Closer" (`You let me violate
you / you let me desecrate you' - it's okay as long as there's Latin
in it, but I don't remember what they did to the chorus to make
it run on NBC), three muscular young men crawl on stage, one of
them in a dog collar on a leash, held by Melinda, a young blonde
in a superheroine costume, bathing suit with boots. One of the men
licks her black stiletto heel boot one last time; then she gets
screwed from behind. By an about four feet wide, fifteen feet
long screw that seems to penetrate her solarplexus. The screw tilts
up; she rotates a few times on its top above some sort of evil
industrial device, is let down again, the screw pulls back, she
emerges unhurt.

How much we believe someone's story depends on the person's status.
Hypnotists, magicians, and con artists have to be authoritative.
In the first minute of the number, Melinda is working
hard to assert her status: she brings a couple of dancers on stage that
look quite capable of defending themselves, and dominates them.

Yet the whole thing bombed. Why?

-

A Las Vegas audience
may appreciate the sexual theme, but the Leno audience visibly would
have preferred yet another joke about basketball players with funny hair.

-

It was too perfect. You didn't for a second
believe that the performer was in danger.
"Cool, they can make it look just as if she was screwed on."

-

There was no climax in the end,
no surprise, because the changes were exactly symmetrical. Stand,
cover, screw, uncover, lift up, put down, cover, unscrew, uncover, bow.

-

And of course we all instinctively know that
the person whose body is violated is not dominant. You can't be
dominant and get crushed or cut up or have people crawl through you.
If you're powerful enough to make these things happen, you're damn
well powerful enough to make them happen to other people,
not to yourself.

"First Lady of Magic" is a curious title, too. Jay Leno kept mispronouncing
it "{First} {lady of magic}", well, that's his problem.
But - I don't know how US-Americans feel, but to me, the First
Lady is the wife of someone important. If I wanted to assert my status
as a performer, I wouldn't claim to be the wife of someone important,
I'd claim that I am important.

compilant, adj.:
Not necessarily compliant, but at least it compiles.

Vagabonds

Stopping for a break with my driving instructor at a rest stop by
the highway, we silently eat our rolls. I worry about having nothing
to say, about being boring and single-minded, and at the same time am
very glad to be that boring and hope to be even more boring in the near future.

When I was a child, driving on the highway happened in its own world.
People on the highway are disconnected from the other world. They live
in rest stops, they listen to songs and announcements on the radio, they
buy bad music and glowing trinkets they can plug into their cigarette
lighter sockets.
Perhaps that's why road movies work; another way of removing
people from the complicated social networks, reducing them to a few
basic relationships.

And then there are vagabonds, sideshows, circuses, who take their
social relations on the road with them on wagons or trailers.

To store the font size etc. for the Psion 3a's no-frills
text editor, configure the running editor, then save an
empty document as the default document. The settings for
any plain document you edit will be copied from that default.

Cigarettes

As I wait for the subway, the sign behind me announces the introduction
of some new brand of cigarettes. The first Lights in a big box! or
something, 25 to a package. That's the way. Smoke lots of barely
noticeable doses, buy more, buy thousands of cigarettes a day.
And feel good. Because they're light.

Thinking backwards, I wonder how many advertising agencies have planned
and thrown away campaigns for small numbers of very strong cigarettes.
Flat, elegant packages, with thick covers that slide back and forth;
cigarettes so - noble you don't dare asking for one from your
neighbor. Cigarettes to hand out at childbirth.

Or perhaps every cigarette could, at the pretense of keeping the flavor
inside, be individually wrapped in cellophane or foil (or the paper that's
already there could be extended and twisted just so), to be individually
unwrapped or torn open, each one a gift from us, the cigarette industry,
to you, the consumer.

And I think fondly back to the time when I still smoked, to the sound
and the feeling and the look of that little piece of gold-colored foil
protecting a set of 18 perfectly aligned cigarette filters (or 20,
if you bought it in the shop and paid more); the way it would, just
for appearance's sake, stick a little to the box as your pull got stronger,
and only then let go.

Flying from Chicago to Frankfurt, I'm sitting between two
married clarinetists.
The husband has started his own mouthpiece business about a year ago; we agree that both of
us haven't had much of a life in the last months.
Clarinet mouthpieces are made from hard rubber; there
are German and French mouthpieces, with the German softer,
more traditional; the French rougher, louder.
He thinks he's found something that's better than anything
he's seen in the last thirty years or so; the man's on a mission.
When he dozes off in three pillows, the wife wakes up,
and she and I talk long-term lives and careers.

What do people do while they program? I've written my secondary thesis about
that, and harbor certain theories about the psychology of it all, but, hey,
your guess is as good as mine. But something is curious: while programming
these days, abstract protocol cruft that nevertheless calls for my full
attention - I re-live the impressions I've had of people, more than a memory,
but less than a hallucination; `social hallucinations,' perhaps.

Here's what I think is happening. While interacting with people (or when
seeing actors on TV), I build models of them; their voice, typical expressions,
things they said or might say. And while I'm trying to concentrate, part of
me falls asleep and dreams: the models come alive. The Irish mechanic from
Deep Space Nine. The Neukoelln working-class woman running the snack
bar next to my driving school. They clatter and cause impressions,
meaningless, dreamlike, but appearing real precisely because the background
information that drives them is what I use to interpret reality, a filter
running backwards.

The dreams become more real with increased abstraction and decreased
concentration; copying a meaningless string of 0 and 1 should bring
them out in force. Perhaps the wordlessness of my interfaces is what
triggers them; the data structures have been generated, and the generator
removes vowels from its variable names, trying to shorten the words; just a
few instances of `GCCICCRt_mnDmnPrmtrs' and there I go again, abstractly
excited, looking for meanings to occupy myself.

I love you Gustaf 28. 12. 95.
(frontback.)
A torn-out sheet from a notebook. I found it in the snow on a
Berlin street, January '96.

You
have done a great job in producing this site. I suggest, however,
that you make the audio clips available in RealAudio format so that users
can listen to them as they download rather than having to wait for the
entire file to be downloaded.

CNN:

Unfortunately, there are no plans to implement Real Audio anytime in
the near future. The primary reason is access to the site. By it's
nature, streaming data opens a connection between the server (us) and
client (you), and won't allow other connections until the data has been
completely transferred.

In other words, if we can support 100 simultaneous connections, 100
people could get a streaming file. If the file takes 2 minutes to
finish, that means we've just kept a few thousand other people from
connecting to the site to get other information.

A central rich distributor and lots of poor clients with puny little PCs and
low-bandwidth modem connections. How can one make that scale?
Who's going to want it most? Who's going to pay for it?

How about: a company that sells cache space.
Running powerful machines with lots of storage and bandwidth,
renting out capacity to those central distributors.
Then CNN, Pathfinder, GNN, and Yahoo each buy a third of a
European server's capacity, and then get the right to redirect
references to their pages to the cached pages.

GNN seems to have planned something like that architecture with
its different distribution site;
I never saw it work that well.

Unless one is a network provider,
there's very little incentive for access paths
to be short; a long and a short internet connection cost
the same if you're just sitting at the end of it.

The one entity that saves money caching is the ISP.So I'd
expect the services to change - from bandwidth measured at
a point towards transmitted data between A and B; or from
IP streams towards availability of data, regardless of location.

YNYGAEPI(You Know You've Got An Ego Problem If) ...
...you read the headline ``Six ways to make people like you'' on a
page about books by Dale Carnegie and think it refers to cloning.

Oasis: Wonderwall
(What is a Wonderwall, anyway? The Superdog of pet rocks?)
The video of the 60ies-retro version by Mike Flowers is breathtaking,
down to the cheesy arrangement, the dance steps, the too-slow wink.
I was disappointed to discover today that "GQ" in GQ Magazine stands for
"Gentleman's Quarterly."I had thought it was a fancy way of
spelling "Geek."
to comute, vb -
to fall silent at the same time.

cyberpunque, adj.

[contraction of `cyberpunk' and `baroque']Overusing
some symbolic trick or transformation.Sending roses
-<-@ or complex
smileys =*:-)X8, spelling elite `31337' and David `Da5id',
replacing every `f' by `ph', and then making it all blink.

[3/9/1996 Jamie Zawinski is using cyberpunque in roughly the same sense, a bit more gothic perhaps.
Coevolution?]

``She watched her entropy the way others watched their weight.''

Deer

I can't sleep.I'm thinking of the deer.

In Nashua, New Hampshire, the car I was in hit a stag.He was
standing in the middle of the road, looking at us, and there
was nothing we could do but hit it, with a dark, metallic
sound.

We stopped and stood in the rain for twenty minutes, waiting
for the car to get towed.No trace of the animal.

A week or two later, with different people in a different
car in a different part of America, we passed another stag,
a dark scheme against a dark line of trees, eyes reflecting
the lights of the oncoming traffic.

``Hey, did you see that just now? We just passed a stag!'' - ``No?'' -
``We could have hit him! He could have jumped in front of the car!'' -
``Well, he didn't.''

Get on with it, that voice seemed to say,
there's no use being scared of a deer that didn't jump.
But I can't forget that sound, and that look, and I can't get
over the silhouette coming closer, much too fast.

``People would compliment her on her
appearance, just to avoid mentioning her personality.''
``Pet Harvest Bar & Grill''

Fun

Riding on the subway.I watch two Turkish guys hit on a
black woman who's sitting right across me.She looks straight
ahead.
The two take turns sitting next to her and talking to her.
Then she says, quitely, ``leave me alone.'' They don't.
One is whispering in her ear.She sits there, unsmiling,
pressed into the far corner of the bench.

I say, ``Hey. Didn't you hear?
She wants you to leave her alone.''
Big uproar.Hey,
they've been riding together practically forever on that line. They're
practically friends.They're just having fun.``Yeah,
right'' I say.They sputter something that I don't
understand.``Can't you imagine what it feels like?'' What
a stupid question to ask of two guys who are just having a little
bit of fun, in their expensive tailored suits and camel hair coats.

The woman gets up and moves away, without
looking at me.The two guys leave on the next stop,
I don't know whether because of me or because they arrived.
I would have felt much better if she'd stayed.

Hair

Saw shots from Reboot, an series for children
that relies exclusively on 3D modeling. The protagonist
had thick, modeled locks of short black hair; it didn't look
natural, it didn't look good; hair is a problem.

So how do you model hair if you have to?
I'm tired of the plastic bricks.
Perhaps shoot three layers of slightly different brick and
alternate between them quickly?Is there a 3-D
equivalent to texture-mapping? Structure mapping?

Testing is a form of bravery; actually going out
and asking people: what do you think about this? Do you
recognize these Icons? Where do you think you are?
It's a very primitive bravery; the technological shell
surrounding the basic insight that you've got to try things out
is still thin. (An astronomer can understand a usability
engineer, but a usability engineer probably can't understand an
astronomer.)

The most striking feature of all of the nine home page iterations
surfaces only briefly in the discussion. The pages,
like so many corporate others, ignore HTML.Their
buttons and links are painted in the GIF, not structural.
Rather than putting a door on the wall, they've replaced it with a
magic wall carpet with a beautiful painting of a door that opens if you click
on it.

What message does this send?

Affluence. ``We can afford to hire professional graphic artists.''
We have nothing to say. ``In comparison to
our words, our pictures and layouts are important.''
The picture is reality. ``You like to see pictures and click on them.
There is no structural information in hypertext that would be important
to retain.''

Wounded building bleeds canvas.

There should be more support for generating paper from Web documents.
Currently, tools seem to think that translating the black and white
specks on the screen into PostScript is enough. Not so.
I want a ``HTML-to-troff'' or ``HTML-to-TeX'' translator that turns links
into footnotes, adds page numbers and perhaps even headers, footers, and
an indication of which document this is.

``The Internet As Anti-culture'', again by Stephen L. Talbott,
unattributed and mispunctuated.
(Can you say `man buried under his own rhetorics?') Of course
Talbott doesn't use this as his own cover, he uses it as
the technology-happy, children-abandoning face of the enemy.

Cyberporn
cover story of TIME Magazine. (More about the Cyberporn debate,
including the text of the study.)

Merlyn LeRoy, probably the person with the most won IOCCC
contests, quotes Gilmore at the end of his obligatory blue-ribbon
area.

(Personally, I just wish the net would interpret damage as damage and
route around it, never mind censorship.)

Why do I mock the parroting of this phrase? Because it is wishful
thinking. Censorship is a serious danger; there is no benevolent
``net'' in the background that routes around it. This is not
a game of hide-and-seek.
Real people go to jail or at least lose their income.

In a way, censorship is not about seeing things, it is about admitting
what you saw. In public.
A society defines: these words, these
images, these people are allowed to exist.

qsort: Bathing an eel with camphor.
Metaverse: I dreamed I was in a VR version of
a web site like hotwired.com, a large casino with bars around which
the patrons clustered.
At the first bar,
a slightly bored Drew Barrymore charged me
$50 for a whiskey whose first half she had gulped down herself.
I refused to pay and fled past the next,
where Kato Kaelin entertained a larger crowd.
As I turned a corner
I almost bumped into a badly lit table lined with green plastic coating
and almost no bottles, where a geek was dribbling all over himself
while practicing his barkeeping. Begging for
evaluation, he jabbed alternately at his three
guests (who all seemed either dead or asleep):
``So how do you like this? Do you think this is good? Huh?''

Crossover

Leafed through a book with Mapplethorpe's photographs - the famous
controversial ones, interspersed with flowers, celebrities, and kids -
on my way to breakfast; then, reading last week's TIME magazine
during breakfast, I find a short item about a ``scandalous'' biography
that has just come out. (Is there an algebraic description of the
transformation one has to do to this kind of article to arrive
at the contents? Just wondering.)

Later that day, I follow an outdated link to a configured query
to the Mr Potatohead server; when I fix up the query URL to query
the new site, the image I get contains a mouth with a pipe
that isn't on the menu. This morning, preparing
my own breakfast, I wonder: has the Mr. Potatohead site been
sanitized, perhaps in response to complaints of anti-smoking
activists? Is it non-PC for toys to be smoking?
And, of course,
what else may be waiting for those bold enough to compose queries
beyond the offered selections?

Mr Potatohead, meet Mr. Mapplethorpe.

Furry press:
There'a a veterinarian I've read about, a woman, slightly autistic;
she's built herself a kind of furry press, a ``hug machine'', that
allows her to feel held safely without being near
another human. The metaphorical applications should be obvious.

Arthur C. Clarke
I'm currently reading English science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's
biography
by Neil McAleer. Nobody I talk to about Clarke knows the name,
but when I say ``2001'' and ``geostationary satellites'' they usually at least
pretend to. There's lots of mankind this, mankind that,
which bears to be taken literally - space travel, science fiction, and Clarke's
biography are all almost completely devoid of females.
Apart from his mother and a woman he married for her looks after three weeks of
courtship in 1953 (so much for ``genius''), the women in that bio
are wives of friends, or wives of colleagues that prepared his dinner
and entertained his friends; the most important of which may well have been
Pip Durant, who, in June 1952, showed to the world's #1 science writer
how to operate a water faucet in order to get his own glass of water.

Four kinds of meaning.

At the start of chapter three of Practical Criticism, I.A. Richards
distinguishes four kinds of meaning: Sense, Feeling, Tone (i.e.,
relationship to between speaker and listener), and Intention.
Although
not under the same names, I was familiar with these categories from
communication theory.
(I doubt that Richards invented them; I suspect
they may be older, based in classical rhetorics perhaps?)

I'm not sure I find them all that intuitive.
In
particular, they lack (to me) a causal, practical basis - the four meanings
are not instruments we play on when we speak; and neither
do we perceive them separately when we listen. There
is no underlying model of communication, speech, language,
identity, meaning.

If they
have no function in invention, and if they have no function in
perception, what is the point of inventing the categories (and demanding that
they be used to compose and analyze text) at all?
Is any kind of access to meaning, however random, good enough?

I have used and known these words briefly - the first is an
X/Window Event; the second, a command in LPMud; the third,
a function in the LPMud programming language LPC.
I don't use them anymore, but they still follow me around, they
have in some weird way become language I would like to use.

Whenever I have to write the HTML <blockquote>
element, it turns into a <localcmd> (which doesn't make the
least bit of sense, their functionalities are technically unrelated);
but ``query_prevent_...'' is still attached to a vague feeling
of carefulness. Substructure­redirect is fun to
pronounce, all those s's and r's and ct's. (I also
wish I was so complex that I not only had a substructure
- rather than just a structure - but even had to redirect it!)

Afterlife:
a postmodern (in the sense of the Italian architecture
clique in the late 60ies) existence in a domed, featureless,
white mallscape without furniture or individual
buildings.
Two pages of which book contain: purloin, auteur, frisson,
repudiation, effuse, detritus,
sumptuary, dissimulate, frontage, seminal, rampart, clerestories?
Welcome to the Jacques Derrida homepage!
This page is still under decon ...

Geeksploitation
The syndrome of a geek doing creative and technically challenging
work for free, or for very little money. Canter &
Siegel recommended using a geek;
there's something in the Penn Jillette/Wired article that
hints at it.
What's being exploited is low self­esteem; since the geek
doesn't know what he or she is worth, and isn't used to fighting
for it, they're easy prey to managers (the trait, not the trade)
who exchange a few fake
pats on the back against solid technical value.

Grrrrl­ism.
They're whistling in the dark, loudly, and out of tune - and
a melody that they first heard on MTV.

Isn't it curious how ``page'' has become a colloquial term for
the word ``document'' in hypertext, in a medium that does not have
pages anymore? Do we reuse words as soon as they are freed up
by technology? Do we reuse those of whose destruction
we can't bear to be reminded?

Q: What do you get if you cross Marcel Marceau and Richard Dawkins?
A: A Pantomeme.

Formerly Known As

I used to support Sun's ``WebRunner'' browser and the ``Oak'' language,
more out of news machismo than for sound technical reasons; together with
the other USENIX visitors, I heard of it perhaps two months before everybody else.
But now Sun has renamed ``Oak'' to ``Java,''
and ``WebRunner'' to ``HotJava,'' (Hot Coffee, get it?)
and someone seems to think it's cute to
call Java programs ``Applets'' (as in small application,
get it?)

So. There is a page with sample applications
that you can't run, because
you don't have the browser - it isn't completely out yet, it's still
a little bit in the closet - and the first words, starting with the
logo, are ``HotJava Cool Applets.''

What kind of person writes this, I wonder? A modern
Kaspar Hauser
perhaps, deprived of meaningful language for so long
that he can no longer emit anything but Markovian variations of the
gibberish around him.

The people who write SGI's Silicon Surf, in contrast,
also emit nothing but gibberish, but they are genuinely evil,
they know no shame. Let's take a moment to read
their buttons.

These people are trying to sell machines costing thousands of dollars
like chewing gum.

Bought a t­shirt this morning, black with a print
advertising Dave McKean's and Neil Gaiman's Mr. Punch.
It cost me a whopping DM 40,-, is too large (they don't even seem
to bother with medium anymore), and smelled like a condom.
Do printers think that people enjoy wearing recycled
tires on their chest? Have they forgotten that one
can color clothes other than smearing hardened goo on them?

Selective tolerance to change: When reading a magazine,
why do people prefer a different text in the same layout
every week to the same text in a different layout?

Blind Test: I recently found the first issue
of Gauntlet, from 1990,
at my comic book shop, in the cheap box, DM 2,-.
Gauntlet tracks mainstream open and hidden censorship;
they print some nonfiction and some censored fiction
and artwork. Half an hour later, I was leafing
through the issue lying on my sofa in the sunlight, skipping
stuff that bored me - and there was this really funny article
about four­letter words. Boy, that guy could
write, I would have bothered to type that in and put it
online if copyright allowed. So I turn back to
see who the author is, and - ahrgh.
George Carlin. (If you
input "fuck" and "comedy" to an American,
you get out George Carlin. It's obvious. It's like
liking a play written by Shakespeare or Goethe.)

By clicking on a colormap
entry in xv's `edit colors' menu with Button 3 (the rightmost one), you can say
`make this color like the currently selected color'. It's what
I use to reduce colors on my gifs. Saved me
lots of time. (The xv documentation is a monolithic,
100 page PostScript file; hence this note.)

Welcome to the Boa homepage!
Warning! This page is still under constric ...

Just hiding documents from the crawler is not enough; I want
to influence the things something is listed for.
There should be HTML elements that emphasize and prevent indices.
Troff has been doing these things right for centuries, why do they have
to be done wrong all over again?

The Rave scene is setting a new record in arrested
spiritualism.
Rave is doing a lot of things churches used to do. Don't
compare it with politics, compare it with churches. The
point is to make people feel good without having them actually do
anything too political.

Yesterday, I caught part of a talk
show where the host and the German DJ Marushka spent about five
minutes pushing an initiative ... well ... the point was, you
were supposed to send them a fax with the outline of your hand
(it was art, you see),
and your name, and that you wanted to preserve the environment.
The host said that the faxes would be handed to the delegates of the
upcoming conference on the environment, to urge them to consider
``Einschneidende Maßnahmen'', definitive/thorough
actions. The talkshow host repeated the meaningless
political phrase a few times; it was clear that he knew it was meaningless,
but he still kept demanding it.
They didn't have a single actual goal.
(But they sure got a lot of faxes. In fact they asked
people not to try other last digits; they showed the phone
number again and the last digit, 1, blinked. ``Damn Netscape'',
I thought.)

Before the digit thing, they talked to a caller on the telephone,
a slow and confused young butcher who had been set up by his friends
during his birthday party and had nothing to say.
Did he own a fax machine? He didn't. They told him to get to a fax in the
afternoon and send his hand, too; after all, wouldn't he want to be
able to continue butchering in the future?

Computer screens will stop looking like desks and
start looking like cockpits.
And I'll thoroughly enjoy it.
I'm feeling about okay, now; I've got three Mosaics up, three tail -f's spewing
things on my screen, and I'm busy writing specs for something to allow me to
answer my mail in parallel. And that's not counting
the walkman and the funny noises from the
boing demon.

I wonder if WebCrawler, Lycos, etc. compile statistics of the
search terms used.
[Mar 1997: They do.
Thanks, Danny!]
Last time I checked,
the Free Online Dictionary Of Computing had been asked 17 times
to define "woman", 8 times each for "pussy",
"adult", and "playboy".
And this is only the Free Online Dictionary Of Computing.
Before checking whether Altoid boxes are waterproof,
take out the Altoids.
The only two words in my /usr/share/dict/words where one base-64-encodes
to the other are jib and amli.